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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Fact Check: Video Blogging

A commenter by the name of factcheck, assures me that the post about video blogging contains an important error. factcheck gives us a quote from the draft:

non-economic activities such as blogs and other user-generated contents without an economic objective and all forms of private communication such as e-mails and private websites, do not fall within the scope of the directive.

So it seems that the media misrepresented it. However though I stand corrected, I still have a question concerning blogs. Does Guido Fawkes blog have an economic objective? How about Conservative Home, or even my humble offering with its Google pennies?

Then there is You Tube, which contains video diaries, takes ups of politicians, archives of internet TV channels as well as adverts. Some of these are commercial, some not. How will the rules work?

The quote can be found on page 13 of the following PDF document: Draft Regulation

9 comments:

James Higham said...

Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home are definitely political and fall within the directive, as with Gavin Ayling's [what happened to him?]... You would not because you are primarily issues based.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Should the EU be in the censorship game at all?

Serf said...

James

The directive seems to imply that it will apply to anything commercial. How much money do you need to earn from blogging, £5, £50, £1.000 per month, for it to be commercial?

Anticitizenone

Your question is another matter all together, and one for which the answer has to be no.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for taking my comment into account.

Perhaps I can shed light on some of the other questions that have come up.

The Directive will apply to commercial services, but only where they are "under professional editorial content."

It also only applies to "audiovisual content." That's eurospeak for movies or video clips.

It would only apply to a website where AV content was the main feature. So this blog would be exempt, even in Euro Serf made a million pounds from google ads.

The basic point of the Directive is to make sure that people can watch movies ot TV shows from one EU country in another without too much hassle.

Its all a case of incomprehensible EU speak being misinterpreted by the press (looking for a sensational story).

This is the EU's main problem at the moment - it cant communicate worth a damn, so all sorts of scares and rumours start running around.

OK, I'm done.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Factcheck,

Everyone is a professional. The Internet is a meritocracy, there are no guilds for the EU to hand out special priviledges to.

Richard said...

"So it seems that the media misrepresented it..."

So there is a surprise! I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/10/much-ado-about-nothing.html

Serf said...

Richard,

Yes amazing isn't it.

Bishop Hill said...

Factcheck

You said:

"The basic point of the Directive is to make sure that people can watch movies ot TV shows from one EU country in another without too much hassle."

I don't follow at all. Surely the whole point is that people can watch movies or TV shows from one EU country in another right now. That's the whole point of the internet, right? Everything is available everywhere. How is putting content which is professionally created under the control of an EU censor going to help this?

Anonymous said...

"The basic point of the Directive is to make sure that people can watch movies ot TV shows from one EU country in another without too much hassle."

The basic point of the Directive is to hassle producers of internet TV so that TV content on the interneat can be controlled similar to traditional TV in all European countries. The aim is to manipulate public opinion to serve the interest of the political class.